Introduction

I'm going to start my review off with this: I hate Samsung smartphones. I really do. The Galaxy S3 was good, but the Galaxy S4 was nothing that interested me. I felt, and still feel that Samsung seriously dropped the ball with the Galaxy S5. The company may sell the most smartphones of any other company on the market, but it doesn't mean their devices are made of quality.

Whereas its main competitor, Apple, has been engineering beautiful devices since day one - Samsung hasn't had an eye for design, until now. The previous Galaxy handsets - not including the Note range - have been plastic toys compared to the Galaxy S6 edge. It's almost like Samsung was playing around with consumers' hearts with the previous handsets and the Galaxy S6 edge is the real deal. This is coming from someone who has steered clear of Samsung handsets in my personal life for quite some time now, as I have been thoroughly loving what Sony has been doing with the Xperia smartphones, and LG with its G3 and soon-to-be G4 smartphone.

Samsung knew it had to do something, and it really changed things up with the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge, which is where we are today. The new smartphones have only been out for a few days now, but I pre-ordered one of the Galaxy S6 edge 64GB smartphones last week and I have now had a little over 48 hours of solid use of it and I can easily say: I'm in love.

Specs

Before we take a look around the smartphone and just how damn beautiful it is, and how amazing it feels in my hands, let's gloss over what Samsung has managed to cram inside of its best handset to date. Inside, we have some serious components and capabilities, such as an 8-core processor and some seriously snappy storage.

Starting with the elephant in the room, the 5.1-inch QHD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 2560x1440 and a pixel density of 577 PPI. The display on the Galaxy S6 edge is protected by Corning's latest and greatest Gorilla Glass 4, too. We have 3GB of RAM, and an 8-core processor thanks to Samsung's own Exynos 7420 (which is made up of a quad-core 1.5GHz Cortex-A53 and quad-core 2.1GHz Cortex-A57).

There's three storage options to choose from: 32GB, 64GB and 128GB, but no expandable storage. Samsung has decided to remove the microSD card slot - which is a great thing for the device itself, but a big selling point that people are going to miss from previous handsets, and something that will lose Samsung some sales.

On the outside, we have an amazingly capable 16-megapixel rear-facing camera with optical image stabilization (OIS) and up front, we have a 5-megapixel shooter for those all important selfies. Both cameras are some of the best snappers that I've used in a smartphone yet - bringing Samsung up to the quality and speed of Apple's cameras in the iPhone, and beating them in some ways.

Samsung has finally provided wireless charging on the Galaxy S6 edge, but there's also fast-charging - which is something we're going to go into more detail about later. The fast-charging capabilities on the Galaxy S6 edge are a selling point in their own, as is the wireless charging capability. There's 4G LTE Cat6 support, as well as Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct and more.

Availability & Price

Depending on where you live, what carrier you want to join (or whichever one you're already with), and the storage option on the Galaxy S6 edge, the pricing will vary. In the US, you're looking at around $299 up front for the 32GB version with Verizon, while the 64GB is $399 up-front, and the 128GB chimes in at $499 up-front.

If you want to go off-contract, it's cheaper with the 32GB starting at $699 and then $100 additional for the 64GB, and another $100 on top at $899 for the 128GB model.

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